Paris Olympics' AC-free ambition melts away as organisers order 2,500 AC units | Hacker News Reader

Paris Olympics' AC-free ambition melts away as organisers order 2,500 AC units

france24.com

19 pointsrntn17 comments

There is a solution: solar panels. When you need AC, usually the solar electricity generation are at high levels. A single AC doesn't need much. My 3kW AC takes 5-6kWh on a hot 30+C day to cool down some 70m2

On those days a 10kW installation produced 59kWh and my panels aren't even positioned ideally south - they are something like SW.

So that means 3 out of 25 of my 405W panels fully fed the AC. A few kW solar installation ain't that expensive if one wants to be eco-friendly.

Yes. Solar panels, and air cons for that matter, are as cheap as ever. We europeans can easily afford this.

Insisting on no air con is a cultural phenomenon. We associate it to something unneccessary, unnatural, excessive, distasteful, and wasteful. Our attitude is changing though ...

Lack of power is not a problem in Nuke powered Paris. No AC was someone's hubris and ambition to be on the forefront of European Green Deal plan.

France generates around 70pc of its electricity from nuclear.

Who cares about this?

It is not just the energy usage but also the refrigerants used. Most common refrigerants used in AC systems are pretty bad GHG'es themselves, often 2,000x worse than CO2.

Are many small portable AC units these days running 1234yf yet?

Can't you get R744 (CO2) AC systems these days?

I've yet to see many small portable ac units running R744 at least in the US. It requires really high pressures to run well.

I'm pretty sure most portable ACs sold in Europe these days are R290 (propane) which has a GWP of about 1/14th of CO2, so for those that's no longer much of a concern.

R290 has a GWP of 3.3, so that's 3.3x worse than CO2 with a GOP of 1. Which makes sense, because when propane breaks down it usually breaks down to CO2.

Thanks for sharing that portable AC's in Europe are R290, I don't think that's super common in the US. But I'm open to being shown wrong on that!

This is not true anymore. Most systems are switching to less dangerous refrigerants.

French taxes payers do care about this. Those 2500 AC units will add to the public bill, and the country can't afford it.

No country can afford the Olympics, it's always a bad investment

Counterexample: the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles had the advantage that they didn't have to build much for the Games. For venues for the events they have enough large arenas and stadiums for the major pro sports teams there and enough universities with large stadiums to cover all the high attendance events.

For the lower attendance sports they had plenty of smaller commercial venues and college facilities.

For housing they used student housing at UCLA and USC. Combined USC and UCLA have around 50k undergraduates with around 40% living on-campus with much of that vacant over the summer.

They ended up only needing to build a couple new venues--one velodrome and one swimming facility, if I recall correctly.

That was then - this is now. I doubt LA would be able to afford the Olympics, if they had to pay for them now. Entire countries cannot afford to host the Olympics anymore - it's time to shut them down for good or revamp them to be actually affordable for hosts and guests.

> I doubt LA would be able to afford the Olympics, if they had to pay for them now.

The 2028 Summer Olympics are in LA.

No doubt those will be single hose stand alone units, the worst kind

[Portable Air Conditioners - Why you shouldn't like them] by Technology Connections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-mBeYC2KGc

Most people don't want to be uncomfortable or poorer to advance environmental plans that are extremely tenuously (to be generous) connected to climate change.

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